"Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water."

"We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin."

"Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving"

“…when you build a road, you build a school, and when you build a school, you build public health… There are 900 hundred illiterate adults in the world. You can not build peace on an empty stomach.”

"To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate."

"I did something that challenged the banking world. Conventional banks look for the rich; we look for the absolutely poor. All people are entrepreneurs, but many don't have the opportunity to find that out"

"Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that"

"poverty is the inability to develop and exercise one's personal capacities"

Sustainable livelihoods are those that can cope with, and recover from stress and shocks, and can continue without undermining the natural resources base. Children are more likely to be food secure and protected when the family has a solid asset base to sustain their livelihoods. At the heart of every human experience is the desire to survive and prosper. To live without fear, hunger or suffering. To imagine how your life could be better and then have the means yourself to change it. But how can society end poverty and achieve prosperity, if its children are underdeveloped, mentally retarded or too weak to attend school? Experience from previous food crisis show that the first move by poor households is to reduce food expenses and cut down on non-staple food consumption. These coping mechanisms first affect the diversity (micro-nutrient content) and safety of diets, the size of portions and ultimately the energy intake. This is compounded by cutbacks on other expenditures, such as health costs, further jeopardizing the nutritional situation of vulnerable families.

All of us have experienced short-term hunger or hunger pangs, but for more than a billion people--or about a sixth of the world's population--chronic hunger and nutrient deficiencies are an ever-present part of daily life. Every day an estimated 24,000 people die from hunger or hunger related causes. Three-fourths of these deaths are children under the age of five. Hunger weakens the body, dulls the mind, and kills the spirit of those who suffer from it. 200 million people-one sixth of the developing world's population suffer from hunger and the fear of starvation. In developing countries, 91 children out of 1,000 die before their fifth birthday.

1) Starvation often occurs in the course of famines, where there is an absolute shortage of food within a bounded area, caused by crop failure or destruction. Recent cases include the droughts of 1983-85 in the Sahelian countries of Africa, and wartime sieges or blockades, such as the continuing warfare in Afghanistan, Angola, and the Sudan. But widespread hunger and starvation can occur even when food is available, if large numbers of people lose their ability to purchase, exchange, or receive food--as was the case in the great famines in Bengal, India (1943), China (1958-60), Ethiopia (1972-73), and the Soviet Union (1932-34).

In such instances, a sudden rise in food prices, drop in labourers' incomes, or marked changes in government policy can create hunger for millions, even in the absence of the more familiar causes of food shortage, such as droughts, floods, pests, or armed conflict. Because famines are such dramatic events, they are often equated with hunger by both the news media and the public, yet they constitute but a very small fraction of hunger in the world. Despite the widespread attention focused on recent famines, only about 15-35 million people, or less than 1 percent of the global population, are at risk of famine in any recent year.

2) Starvation, the near absence of dietary intake suffered in the course of famines, can be contrasted with under-nutrition, which is the chronic or seasonal absence of needed food proteins and caloric energy. Over half of these underweight children live in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, and a lively debate persists as to whether such numbers are accurate or overestimated.

3) Apart from the protein–energy malnutrition there is also the "hidden hunger" of micro-nutrient deficiencies, of which three dominate: dietary shortages of iron, iodine and Vitamin A. Iron deficiency is due largely to the relatively low content and poor availability of iron in most foods of plant origin, including grains, legumes, and vegetables. It is frequently precipitated by intestinal blood loss due to hookworm, schistosomiasis (a severe endemic disease in much of Asia, Africa, and South America), and malaria. Some 40 percent of the world is anaemic, with higher rates in women. Mild to moderate iron deficiency lowers mental performance, impairs immunity, increases susceptibility of infection, lowers physical work capacity, and leads to increased morbidity and mortality.

Needed iodine comes from seafood or seaweed or from plants grown on soils that were once the floor of ancient seas. Thus the soils of high mountain areas and of many flood plains are deficient in this essential micro-nutrient. Upwards of 12 percent of the world's population suffer from disorders resulting from iodine deficiency during pregnancy. These range from feeble-minded dwarfs known as cretins to a range of less obvious neurological disorders including deaf-mutism, lowered intelligence, and simple goiters.

Vitamin A is readily obtained from animal foods and from leafy green, red, and yellow vegetables and fruits. These foods may be only seasonally available, or are sometimes not usually fed to young children. A deficiency in vitamin A leads to eye diseases that affect up to 14 percent of small children, and to blindness, and death.

4) The fourth hunger is for a safe and sanitary environment-including safe water, clean air and sanitation-so essential for promoting health, growth and nutrition. There are nutrient- depleting diseases, in which dietary intake may not be absorbed, or is wasted by fever or parasites that are carried in the body. Hunger occurs in the form of nutrient-depleting diseases such as diarrhoea, in which food that is eaten may not be absorbed; by measles or malaria, in which it is wasted by fever; or when it is shared with parasitic worms. Almost five million small children die each year from such disease, and the growth of tens of millions more are affected by bouts with these all-too prevalent maladies.

In sum then, in the 1990s, famine persists, but almost always in connection with armed conflict, as in Liberia and the Sudan. Three-quarters of a billion people--one of every eight who live on the planet--are in households that are too poor to obtain the food they need for sustenance and light activity. One child in six is born underweight, and almost two in five children are underweight by age five. About five million die each year of nutrient-depleting disease. 12 million people die each year from lack of water, including 3 million children from water-borne disease: 1.1 billion lack access to clean water; 2.4 billion live without decent sanitation; and 4 billion without waste-water disposal.

These different faces of hunger overlap, but it is likely that more than a billion of the world's 5.8 billion people experience some form of hunger during the year. If this is so today, what are the prospects for tomorrow, in the rapidly changing world of the next century? World population is set to soar – there is no other word for it – by 34 per cent to 9.1 billion by 2050. Also consider the fact that poor countries are also among the most inequitable in terms of income distribution.

About a sixth of the world's people are hungry today. It is estimated that British households throw away 4.1m tonnes of food each year — the equivalent of £420 for every home. According to one estimate, 1bn people could be lifted out of hunger if food waste in the US and UK could be eliminated, because of the knock on effect that extra food has on global food prices. But to put a lasting end to hunger requires more than donations of bags of grain and tins of milk. There must not only be plenty of food, but food produced in ways that are environmentally sustainable, and assistance in providing increased income for those who are poor. To end famine requires not only a surplus of food and a willingness to distribute it in times of emergency, but also a widespread recognition of the human right to food, and effective mechanisms to prevent armed conflict. To reduce under-nutrition to a minimum, the world must not only be more wealthy, but also more willing and able to provide food entitlements as needed to poor and vulnerable groups.A permanent end to hunger will also need to address the great global changes in environment, population, economy, and world order.

It is generally accepted that today there is more than enough food in the world. Hunger, it is argued, is a problem of distribution: a matter of access to the available global food supply. This certainly seems to be the case for a nutritionally-adequate, primarily vegetarian diet, for which production today is sufficient to feed 120 percent of the world's population. At the same time, there is only enough food produced at present to meet the nutritional desires of about three- quarters of the world's present population, were everyone given access to the widely preferred diet that contains a modest amount of products from animals that are fed with cereal grains. With increased income, most poor people want to spend some of what they have gained for a more diverse diet, that includes animal products, where these are not proscribed by religious doctrine. Thus how many people the world can feed depends very much on what they eat.

Economists and others rightly point out that the world has much unused capacity for producing food. If poor countries and poor people had greater purchasing power, they argue, then more food would be produced and made available. But would there be enough for the doubled, or as some fear, the possibly tripled population of a warmer and more crowded world? The answer is yes, if something close to the historic (1934-1989) rate of growth of food production of 2.1 percent per year can be sustained. But recent trends have raised questions as to whether and how long we can maintain this rate of annual increase in food production.

Analysts cite a litany of concerns that might constrain the continued growth in food production. In terms of the natural resources that are required for food production, there are losses of farmland, limits to freshwater supplies, erosion and degradation of soils, and declining genetic diversity. For agriculture, there are biological limits to yields, diminishing returns, and associated problems from the extensive use of fertilizers and pesticides. As hazards, there are new plant and animal diseases, increased ultraviolet radiation, air pollution, climate change, and sea-level rise. There are also socio-economic constraints of inadequate markets, infrastructure and research investment, and limited access by poor farmers to land, capital, and technology.

As alternatives to these specific biophysical and socio-economic limitations, agricultural scientists are quick to point out at least four major opportunities for increasing the food supply: (1) the unrealized potential to increase yields from the application of current techniques and technologies; (2) the possibilities provided by the biotechnological revolution that is now underway; (3) the development of organic and sustainable agriculture techniques; and (4) the opportunity to reduce food losses and to increase efficiency in the preparation and use of food. Trebling or quadrupling global food production is within the range of the possible. But to do so, much that is different will need to happen in farmers' fields, in research institutions, in agricultural markets, and in the households that consume the food produced.

Whether we take comfort from the technological optimists or concern from the biological pessimists, there is wide agreement that trebled food production could not be sustained under current practices, given the additional burdens of soil and water loss, pesticide and fertilizer use, and the potential for change in the global climate. Finally, the global food system is not very efficient in harvesting what is grown and in transforming raw agricultural products into usable food. Some have estimated that over half of the available food is wasted in the process--in fields and storage in poor countries and in processing and consumption in richer ones. As in the case of energy production and consumption, there are many opportunities for "food energy" conservation.

So how have we come together to create a new sustainable environment for future generations?

Let's recall the five "sets of factors" that may affect what happens to past societies that have collapsed: environmental damage, climatic change, hostile neighbours, loss of trading partners, and the society's own responses to its environmental problems.

Unfortunately we have responded by building an entire industry around “Corporate Social Responsibility” programs, the perfect rock for companies to hide behind; every imaginable consumer product is now environmentally conscious; corporate polluters are challenging you to be more responsible, and charging you for it...

It's ironic that the Westernized world is the force behind the Green Movement, demanding that the rest of the world comply, yet they are the very ones who rely on Third World nations to pollute and harm the environment in the name of manufacturing. Rich countries are being hypocritical in criticizing China's greenhouse gas emissions while using the country's cheap labour in industries that pollute. A trade wolf in green sheep's clothing.

{Historic Pattern- The British would remain in Egypt for 70 years until Gamel Abdel Nasser's nationalist revolt tossed them out. They would grant Egypt nominal independence in 1922, but in order to maintain their hold over the Suez Canal, the gateway to British India and Asia, they would retain control over Egypt's finances and foreign policy. The indirect kind of imperial rule was developed by the United States in Cuba in 1901 after Roosevelt's Secretary of War Elihu Root realized that direct rule could bring war and rebellion, as it had done, to the McKinley administration's surprise, in the Philippines. The British later adopted this kind of imperial rule in Egypt and Iraq.}

With 1.3 billion people, China spews about 10,500 pounds of carbon dioxide per person, while the United States releases nearly 42,500 pounds per person, about four times as much. Europe is one of the world's leading producers of bio-fuels, mostly made from rapeseed oil. It accounts for two-thirds of the global market, with Germany as one of the largest producers.

Asian producers are increasingly important players in the global bio-fuels trade. Asian bio-fuels are a by-product of palm oil, a sustainable vegetable oil and food staple for which demand is rapidly growing in Asia. Palm oil bio-fuel cannot be produced in quantities that will rival oil-based fuels, but it is cheaper than rapeseed.

So, in predictable fashion, Europe's agricultural industries are defaulting to their traditional practice when a cheaper and better product becomes available to European consumers. They have inserted trade barriers in the Renewable Energy Directive to restrict imports of bio-fuel. And, as usual, they are pretending that the barriers serve another purpose — in this case preserving forest biodiversity.

Conversely, the WWF target in forest preservation has not been reached in most of the European Union. In Germany, land reserved to conserve natural forest is just 4 percent. Where are the demands to restrict E.U. trade to protect Europe's forest biodiversity?

Furthermore, Asian bio-fuel is significantly more sustainable than European bio-fuel. It also uses much less land to produce the same amount of energy and generates 10 times as much energy as is required to produce it. By contrast, bio-fuels produced from European rapeseed generate only four times as much energy relative to the input.

Despite this, European bio-fuel producers and environmental NGOs are pressuring the E.U. to increase the trade coercion in the Renewable Energy Directive by restricting imports if something called “Indirect Land Use Change” occurs when they are produced.

Let me be plain about what this means. The conversion of forest land to produce higher value products like palm oil, cocoa or rubber is the leading means of reducing poverty in most developing countries. The idea being toyed with in Brussels is to use the threat of trade sanctions to pressure countries into giving up the leading anti-poverty tool."

"Outsourcing our emissions reductions is not just scientifically unsound, it is morally wrong and sends a very negative signal to the international climate talks. It means the EU could cherry pick the cheapest climate mitigation potential in developing countries in order to prolong our own unsustainable model."

It ignores the fact that developing countries also have to take measures to reduce their own emissions (by 15-30% by 2020 based on business as usual according to the UN IPCC, as endorsed by EU environment ministers). Member states seem to overlook the fact that there can be no 'double counting', so developing countries would still have to deliver their own emissions reductions in addition to those delivered to offset European emissions.

Now lets chew on this little fact for a moment: In India, more than one-fifth of the population is chronically hungry and 48% of children under five years old are malnourished. Nevertheless, India exported US$1.5 billion worth of milled rice and $322 million worth of wheat in 2004. India’s decision to rebuild its rice stocks made food unaffordable for millions half a world away as now people must depend on food that's grown thousands of miles away because their homeland agriculture has been transformed. The people who best know the land are being separated from it; their farms enclosed into gigantic outdoor factories that produce only for export. Contrary to the claims of agribusiness, the latest agricultural research, including more than a decade of concrete experience in Cuba, proves that small and mid-sized farms using sustainable agroecological methods are much more productive and vastly less damaging to the environment than huge industrial farms.

Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the banana trade. ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world’s corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year's crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food. The global food industry is not organized to feed the hungry; it is organised to generate profits for corporate agribusiness.

The World Bank and the IMF often attach loan conditionalities based on what is termed the 'Washington Consensus'. Many infrastructural projects financed by the World Bank Group have social and environmental implications for the populations in the affected areas and criticism has centred around the ethical issues of funding such projects. There are also concerns that the World Bank working in partnership with the private sector may undermine the role of the state as the primary provider of essential goods and services, such as healthcare and education, resulting in the shortfall of such services in countries badly in need of them. IMF conditionalities may additionally result in the loss of a state's authority to govern its own economy as national economic policies are predetermined under the structural adjustment packages.

Example: The proposal to integrate Haiti into the global economy called for privatizing rice, sugar, and cement production and dropping tariffs on imports. But the result, according to Haitian and international activists, was to wipe out domestic production of these vital commodities, leaving the impoverished country more import-dependent than ever, and its people less able to pay.

World Bank-funded construction of hydroelectric dams in various countries have resulted in the displacement of indigenous peoples of the area.

They pushed for installing ''terminator genes'' in crops so that poor farmers cannot save seed from year to year, jeopardizing monarch butterflies in an effort to grow pest-resistant corn.

A high percentage of current borrowing by debtor countries goes to pay off the private banks, ''transferring private debt into public debt'' and shifting the risk to the public, whose taxes underwrite the two agencies.

At the same time, he said, they ''impose costs on the poor who didn't borrow'' by insisting on privatization because people who already are rich are most able to buy when a nation sells off its telephone company or - as in Haiti's case - its cement company and sugar processors.

''No matter how many times they fail,'' the IMF and the World Bank can make policy in poor nations ''because they are the only game in town'' for countries that cannot get credit elsewhere, Jeffrey Sachs, director of Harvard University's Center for International Development, said ''They hold the purse strings. ''

The International Trade Organisation, meanwhile, serves as the primary means of creating and enforcing global free trade agreements. In every case that has been brought to the organization challenging environmental or public safety legislation on behalf of corporations, the corporations have won. When foreign commercial shrimp fishing interests challenged the protection of giant sea turtles in our endangered species act, the turtles didn't stand a chance. When it was Venezuelan oil interests versus the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's air quality standards for imported gasoline, the oil interests won. When it was U.S. cattle producers against the European Union's ban on hormone-treated beef, European consumers lost.

A major criticism then has been that in its current form, intellectual property rights regimes like TRIPS serve to stifle competition and protect one's investments and profits from it in that way. For poor nations it makes developing their own industries independently more costly, if at all possible. Furthermore, as with the genetically engineered food section, indigenous knowledge that has been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years in some developing countries have been patented by large companies, without consent or prior knowledge from indigenous communities. People then find that they have to “buy” back that which they had already known and used freely.

TRIPS aims to prevent imitation of products (which is ironic, given that this would allow further competition and better prices for drugs and other products, which is something that transnational corporations have often sung as being the benefits of free trade and corporate-led capitalism with minimal restrictions). The effect of the 20 year period of a patent protection is to basically deny others (such as developing countries and their corporations) from developing alternatives that would be cheaper. Technology transfer is prevented (again, a direct contradiction to those who support the WTO, free trade in its current forms etc., which includes western multinational pharmaceutical corporations.)

Tighten the money supply to raise internal interest rates to whatever heights are needed to stabilize the value of the local currency. Tight monetary policy and sky-rocketing interest rates not only stop productive investment, stampeding savings into short-run financial investment instead of long-term productive investment, it keeps many businesses from getting the kind of month-to-month loans needed to continue even ordinary operations. This fosters unemployment and drops in production and therefore income. Fiscal austerity-raising taxes and reducing government spending-further depresses aggregate demand, also leading to reductions in output and increases in unemployment.

A recent example of this continued trend: When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of sky-rocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico's status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work–many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

A recent hopeful example: In 1990, 8.8% of the Brazilian population lived in a situation of extreme poverty; by 2005, this percentage had fallen to 4.2%, which means that in this period 4.7 million people were freed from extreme poverty. If the current trend continues until 2008, that segment will represent 2.2% of the population. Moreover, the non-income target associated with MDG1 has also been strengthened by the Brazilian government.

A few contextual elements provide a better understanding of the recent progress obtained by Brazil. The country has a population of approximately 184 million people, and it ranks among the largest economies in the world. Despite its sheer size, inequality is still very high. However, in recent years, there has been significant progress towards the improvement of the living conditions of the population, through a combination of economic and political stability, economic growth, environmental responsibility and social justice. According to the 2007/2008 UN Human Development Report, Brazil has achieved a Human Development Index of 0.8 for the first time, which places it in the group of high human development countries (UNDP 2007). Between 2003 and 2006, the reduction of poverty reached 31.4%, which means that fourteen million people overcame extreme poverty during this period. In 2006 the Brazilian income concentration reached its lowest rate in the last 30 years (Neri 2007).

Despite the recent progress, a large share of the population still lives in a situation of poverty. Brazil still has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world, as a result of a historic process of economic growth with inequitable distribution of income and opportunities. Given this context, overcoming the serious and interrelated problems of poverty and inequality in Brazil requires a sustained and integrated effort from all levels of government and also from civil society. Rather than halving the population living in hunger from 1990 to 2015, Brazil has pledged to eliminate hunger in the country altogether by 2015 (Brasil 2007).

Food and water are essential elements that all human beings must have access to in order to live. Governments must assure citizens of accessibility, availability and security of food and water. Availability is the very presence of food or means of production of food in a community or household; this includes a water source. Accessibility is the ability of the people to actually obtain the available food and resources; in many countries accessibility is more of a problem than the actual availability. Security means that food and water are always available and accessible to the population, both in the present and for future generations.

The food crisis and farm crisis are rooted in an irrational, anti-human system. To feed the world, urban and rural working people must join hands to sweep that system away. While the particular surprises are unpredictable, some of their origins are readily imaginable.

Ending Hunger: Current Status and Future Prospects by Robert W. Kates

ps- feed the acutely hungry poor just give them spirulina (a nutritious algae). Anyone who has the money even to buy salt will stay away from it coz its not tasty at all.

To quote journalist Palagunmi Sainath in Everybody Loves a Good Drought: “Development is the strategy of evasion. When you can’t give people land reform, give them hybrid cows. When you can’t send children to school, try non-formal education. When you can’t provide basic health to people, talk of health insurance. Can’t give them jobs? Not to worry, just redefine the words ‘employment opportunities’.”To this one may add: “If you don’t want to really solve the causes of child labour -- just ban it and hope it will go away.”

"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age."

​e.g. of how does it affect my region?

"North east India has a high concentration of Christians, but there are fears this is being exploited by criminals disguising themselves as missionaries and evangelists in order to traffic children.

Last month, over 70 such malnourished children from Manipur, Nagaland and other north eastern states were rescued from a home at Kuzhithurai in Kanyakumari district.

Families, in Manipur in particular, are reportedly sending their children off in the hands of traffickers who have promised to give them an education or employment" Times of India reported on Feb. 2010

There have been reports of children dying in suspicious circumstances and of others being molested and abused.

"These institutions exploit religion to make money. With many of them not registered with the government, the homes escape scrutiny,"said Vidya Reddy of the Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse in Tulir, according to the Times of India.

In light of the reports, the Church has become concerned for the welfare of children.

"This trend is shocking and deplorable," said Dr. Hrangthan Chhungi, theologian and Secretary of Commission on Adivasis/Tribals in the National Council of Churches in India.

"It is indeed very ruinous and gross that religion is used for the trafficking business," she said. "Taking the name of Christianity, they lure gullible Christians, specially the parents of poor families or guardians of homeless children and make it a thriving business."

In explaining why Manipur is an easy target, Chhungi noted how the Kuki people in that state are one of the most victimized tribes in inter-tribe conflicts. These conflicts and killings have rendered children without parents in recent years.

"This sorry situation is taken advantage and made a business by vested interests," she stated.

Knowing this, the National Council of Churches in India plans to hold a symposium to raise awareness of child trafficking among churches and NGOs.

The ecumenical organization of Protestant and Orthodox churches in India presently represents 13 million Christian people through out the country and includes groups such as National Council of YMCAs, YWCA of India, Churches Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), and Bible Society of India (BSI).

In total, NCCI is made up of twenty-nine member churches , fourteen regional councils, fourteen all-India organizations and seven related agencies.

People who are honest to themselves and show kindness to strangers, inspire me the most. I totally dig when the taken-for-granted everyday things are used to create dark and ridiculousness, evoking our authentic emotions.

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